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OUT OF CONTROL:
A 15-YEAR BATTLE
AGAINST CONTROL UNIT PRISONS

5. WELCOME TO THE VORTEX

Flyer calling for the demonstration.

As I’ve said, we
had told ourselves
that this was an ad
hoc, one-time
conference, and
that afterwards we
would return to
our other political
work. But when it
was over the
energy and
excitement that
had been
generated drew us
in, and we could
not bring
ourselves to walk
away. We also
realized that no
one else was
taking on this
difficult but
necessary work.

Soon after the
conference, the
National
Committee to Free
Puerto Rican Prisoners of War and the National Committee to Defend
New Afrikan Freedom Fighters informed CEML they were planning a
joint demonstration at Marion and Lexington, Kentucky on April 19th
and asked for our participation.

The BOP had announced the opening of
a new control unit for women at Lexington and had already
acknowledged that it would be used to house women political prisoners.

On the heels of our conference, the John Howard Association, an Illinois
prison reform group, released a 20-page report based on their recent inspection of Marion. We felt their observations and recommendations
were mild, but welcomed them nonetheless as another voice of
concern. More importantly, we doubted that without a grassroots,
activist movement the Bureau of Prisons would be responsive to any
observations, recommendations, etc. If a Congressional Subcommittee
could not alter the situation, how could prison reform groups have
an impact? The only way to proceed, we felt, was to build an actual
grassroots movement that would be out in the streets demanding
change.

We agreed immediately to participate in and co-sponsor the April 19th
demonstration, with the idea that it might generate momentum and
afterward other people would take up the cause while we went back to
our other political work. This was, after all, an important opportunity
not only to support the logistics of the demonstration, but also to
organize around the issues that had motivated us to hold the conference
in the first place. We knew it would be difficult, not only because we
would have to convince other white people to attend this 30-hour
demonstration at two prisons in two different states, but also because
we would have to produce literature, hold many meetings, and provide
financial support.

As our first step, we enlarged the committee by appealing to many
of the people who had helped us with the conference. Each person
we approached agreed to help—some joined the committee and
others made it clear that while they could not work regularly on the
demonstration, they would be willing and eager to attend and help
whenever they could. We produced a pamphlet for the demonstration
as well as a more general pamphlet about Marion and Lexington that
would become a primary piece of literature in our work.

Flyer calling for the benefit.

Up until now, everything had come out of our own pockets and there
wasn’t much left in our pockets, so we had to do something else.
In March we served a spaghetti dinner to raise money and showed
“Brother From Another Planet,” a great comedic yet serious movie by
John Sayles in which an extraterrestrial who happens to be a Black man
accidentally crashes his spacecraft in New York City.

Lots of people came
from the Central
America solidarity and
peace movements. We
believed that the
people in this growing
movement were
natural allies in this
prison work. Some of
them had been to
prison for acts of civil
disobedience. Others
shared our attitudes
regarding issues of
poverty and injustice.
We argued in our flyer that:

. . .our own experiences
participating in the antiintervention,
anti-apartheid,
anti-nuclear, and
disarmament movements
have shown us that we also [like the prisoners] cannot rely on Congress
or the courts to recognize or protect the rights of people when these
rights are in conflict with the aims of the U.S. government. We have
thus taken to the streets and demonstrated in order to expose human
rights abuses caused by U.S. intervention in Central America and U.S.
support for the apartheid regime of South Africa. For the same reasons
we must take to the streets and demonstrate to expose and protest the
human rights abuses which occur in U.S. prisons.

Sure enough, many people responded to our call and the starkness that
was Marion. 130 people attended the dinner, far beyond expectations.
We raised $400. Great, but nothing near the $10,000 we needed to pay
for the buses and other expenses.

We asked several individuals, all of whom had spent time in prison and
were well respected among activists, to help us out. Morton Sobell was
a co-defendant of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and had spent 18 years in
prison, five of those years at Alcatraz.8 All of these ex-prisoners—Daniel
Berrigan, Rafael Cancel Miranda, and Morton Sobell—were glad to sign
a letter calling on people to join us and provide financial support to
the organizing effort. They argued that, “the demonstrations of April 19 are absolutely essential to prisoners across the country, to the antirepression
struggle in general, and to the battles for national liberation
being waged within the borders of the United States. In short, we can
think of few political tasks more relevant that will be occurring in the
next couple of months.”

Demonstrators at the gates to Marion Prison, April 1986.

Banner at Marion Demonstration

The fundraising appeal to our friends proved productive and many
people who were unable to join the caravan (and some who were able)
donated a $60 seat for someone else.

We realized the mobilization wouldn’t succeed unless we were
connected with people in Lexington and southern Illinois. With this
in mind Steve and I made several trips to both places and met with
many wonderful people who ensured the success of the activity. We
left nothing to chance. We drove the possible route of the caravan more
than once to determine which prison to go to first, where the pit stops
might be, what the optimal times of arrival were, where to park, how to
maximize visibility, how to contact local media outlets, what and where
to eat, etc.

Steve was the most well known person at our neighborhood Kinko’s
copy shop. When he arrived, he was greeted like Norm entering
Cheers—“where everybody knows your name.” We held untold
numbers of night-time meetings. Our kids had to adjust to this life as
well. One night we were having a Marion meeting in our home when
our eight-year-old son Michael walked into the room. “I’m hungry.
Where’s dinner?,” he asked reasonably. “We’re so busy, Michael, can you possibly just grab some Cheerios?” Steve answered. Michael
obediently trudged back to the kitchen returning only minutes later with
a frustrated response—“there are no Cheerios!” There are many funny stories like this one but they indicate what a challenge it was to do this
political work, support it financially, to raise our kids and—oh yes—go
to work each day.

It pissed me off when people would yell “get a job” as we
demonstrated, since we voluntarily took up this second job without
financial recompense. In fact, we generally emptied our pockets. Steve
and I probably spent $5,000 of our own money each year. He was an
epidemiologist with a Ph.D., and I was a graduate student and then a
social worker during the entire Marion work. This was an all-volunteer
effort. We had no paid staff. We had no event planners. Every detail was
up to us and our friends. I say all this not to pat ourselves on the back,
but because I believe it’s important to explain the labor-intensive nature
of serious political work.

The upside of the work, the joy of the work, is largely the company
we got to keep. First of all, Steve and I were lucky enough to have one
another. We loved spending time together while we planned the details.
We loved working with José and Jan and getting to know them better.
We loved meeting the many wonderful people without whom we would
have been lost. In Marion and the adjacent town of Carbondale we
met ministers, lawyers, professors, nurses, doctors, peace activists, and
students, all of whom helped us in different ways with logistics, media,
a pre-demonstration forum, and documentation of the events. And
even my children, Rosa and Michael, benefited from the exposure to the
work, dragged along to demonstrations and events, and meeting many
interesting people along the way.